So why is the
largest Kurdish organisation of all, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), still outlawed? This
article discusses current developments in Kurdistan and gives a brief
overview of the history of the Kurdish liberation movement and the PKK’s
illegal status in Germany. It argues for a radical left strategy
focused on defeating the ban on the PKK.

'It wasn’t the Americans who saved us. It was God and the PKK.'

August 2014: Terrorist militias under the leadership of the Islamic
State (IS) storm a region in northern Iraq near the Syrian border
inhabited by the Yazidis, a millennia-old monotheistic ethno-religious
Kurdish minority. Divisions of the Peshmerga, the region’s armed forces,
flee from the advancing IS troops without firing a shot. The Yazidis
beg the Peshmerga to at least leave them their weapons so as to give
them a chance at defending themselves, but the Peshmerga refuse. Tens of
thousands of Yazidis are forced to flee into the nearby mountains.
Those who stay behind are subjected to brutal, genocidal acts: thousands
killed, hundreds buried alive, and countless acts of rape, kidnapping
and enslavement are perpetuated against Yazidi women. To add insult to
injury, IS fighters ransack and destroy ancient Yazidi holy sites.

But even those who were able to flee faced the possibility of a
looming humanitarian catastrophe. The fleeing Yazidis were surrounded by
the IS and trapped in the mountains with little food or water under
conditions of extreme heat. Abandoned by the rest of the world, it
seemed as if they had little choice but to wait for death -- that is,
until unexpected reinforcements arrived: divisions of the Kurdish
People’s Protection Units (PYG) break through IS lines in northern
Syria, while guerilla fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)
advance from the north and fighters from their Iranian sister
organisation, the PJAK (Party of Free Life of Kurdistan), from the east.
The Kurdish fighters manage to establish an escape corridor, through
which tens of thousands pass into liberated Kurdish areas of northern
Syria. It is only days after their escape that the US bombing campaign
and accompanying Peshmerga offensive begins. Surviving Yazidis
repeatedly insisted to Western journalists that “it wasn’t the Americans
who saved us. It was God and the PKK.”

The northern Syrian Kurds came to the Yazidis’ assistance despite
having to defend themselves from the IS on their home territory as well.
The north Syrian Kurds in question are forces under the command of the
Democratic Union Party (PYD), a sister organisation of the PKK. PYD
forces joined the struggle against Bashar al-Assad at the outset of the
Syrian revolution and expelled his troops from the northern parts of the
country. Following this victory they declared themselves neutral in the
ongoing civil war and restricted themselves to defending their
territory. It was here on this territory that the Kurds began building a
self-organised and democratic form of self-governance called “Rojava”
that is stunningly unique in the world today.

In Rojava one finds a parliament with set quotas mandating the
participation and inclusion of women in parliament and all levels of
government, with similar rules for ethnic and religious minorities. To
defend the region the Kurds established the non-partisan and
non-sectarian defence units of the YPG, which also include large
independent women’s divisions - establishing an island of hope toward
self-organisation and emancipation in the middle of the nightmare that
is the Syrian civil war. This island of hope, however, was threatened
from the onset: Turkey closed its borders in an attempt to starve the
Kurdish self-government. Ankara also supported the Islamist terror group
ISIS, the predecessor to the IS, which attacked the Kurdish regions
from the south.

The IS acquired extensive caches of weapons from the fleeing Iraqi
army after they overtook Mosul, a city of over 1 million in northern
Iraq, including heavy weaponry originally purchased from the US. These
weapons were immediately dispatched to Syria to be used in a major
offensive against Kobanê, a centre of the Kurdish self-government, in
July 2014.

The YPG, militarily out-gunned and outmatched, prepared for a
desperate fightback. But, once again, assistance came from outside:
people all across the Kurdish parts of Turkey donated money, food and
medicine to support besieged Kobanê. Thousands set up camp along the
border to destroy the border fence in a provocative act of civil
disobedience and thereby broke through the Turkish blockade. The PKK
sent hundreds of its guerilla fighters down from the mountains to join
the struggle in Kobanê, and volunteers from all over Kurdistan as well
as members of left-wing Turkish political parties joined them.

This
impressive show of solidarity was successful: the offensive of the IS
was stopped, Kobanê has still not fallen, and the democratic experiment
of Rojava could live on. But at the time of this writing, Kobanê is once
again under threat: the IS began a renewed offensive against the city
at the end of September. IS terrorists have managed to slip into the
city and engage in house-to-house fighting with YPG units. After long
delays, the US decided to “support” Kurdish forces by bombing IS
positions.

The Kurdish liberation movement – a historical overview

The IS offensive in Syria and Iraq has thrust the Kurdish question
into the limelight of world politics for the first time in years, as
well as highlighted the contradictions manifest in the West’s attitude
toward it. Western allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have at
the very least tolerated (and perhaps even supported) the rise of the IS
for quite some time, while historically the US, European Union (EU) and thus Germany
have treated the PKK – the single most effective and successful force
currently fighting the IS – as a terrorist organisation.

The Kurdish people are the largest ethnic group without a state in
the world. Their national interests went ignored by the major
imperialist powers during the re-division of the Middle East after World
War I, leaving up to 18 million Kurds living in Turkey, between 5
and 7 million in Iran, 5 million Iraq and 2 million in Iran
today.

The 20th century history of the Kurds is a history of oppression and
resistance. The century witnessed multiple uprisings for national
independence, democratic freedoms and cultural self-determination. In
fact, an independent Kurdish state with loyalties to the Soviet Union
emerged in Iran after World War II. After being defeated by Persian
troops, left-wing Kurdish groups continued their armed struggle – first
against the dictatorship of the Shah, and later against the clerical
regime of the mullahs.

Iraq, however, remained the centre of the Kurdish
resistance movement for many years. This movement consisted primarily
of two different parties leading the struggle against Saddam Hussein and
for an independent Kurdistan: the traditionalist and conservative
Democratic Party of Kurdistan (KDP) and the ideologically somewhat more
progressive Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

As history would have
it, however, the Kurdish freedom fighters who would later come to be
known as the Peshmerga quickly became the playthings of various foreign
powers. For example, during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, Iraq
supported the Iranian Kurds while Iran armed the Iraqi Kurds; at the
same time, the US supported its then-ally Saddam Hussein in his bloody
suppression of the (Iraqi) Kurdish uprising. It was in the small Kurdish
city of Halabja that, for the first time since World War II, poison gas was once again implicated in mass killings – German
corporations had sold Saddam the chemicals used in the massacre.

This constellation shifted in 1990, at the outset of Saddam’s
invasion of Kuwait. With the outbreak of the first Gulf War, Iraqi Kurds
suddenly became potential allies of the US. The US established a no-fly
zone across northern Iraq in the 1990s in return for their
participation in the war, under the protection of which Kurdish fighters
were able to expel Iraqi soldiers from the territory. The Kurds also
fought on the side of the US in the second Gulf War in 2003, and were
rewarded with an autonomous region following Saddam’s fall. This region
was under control of the KDP and PUK, but only encompassed part of the
Kurdish-populated areas of Iraq. The PKK was also able to establish
guerilla bases for their struggle against the Turkish state here as well

Kurdish uprisings continued to occur in Turkey itself as well.
Oppression of Kurds is particularly severe in Turkey, due primarily to
the fact that their existence as a separate ethnic and cultural group
clashes with the vision of a unitary ethnic Turkish state as projected
by the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk. Kurds were forbidden from
speaking their own language, using Kurdish names or even writing the
letters W and X, which exist in the Kurdish, but not Turkish, language.

Following a series of large student- and labour-led movements in the
1970s, Turkey became host to a plethora of large, left-wing parties,
including the PKK, founded in 1978 by a group of left-wing activists
centred around Abdullah Öcalan. The party adopted a Marxist-Leninist
political program and oriented itself towards armed revolution with
the aim of establishing an independent, socialist Kurdistan. The PKK was
forced into exile with many other leftist groups in Turkey in 1980,
after right-wing military officers enacted a coup and unleashed a wave
of savage repression against the Turkish left.

The PKK found refuge in the Lebanese training camps of the
Palestinian popular liberation front, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and fought with them against
the Israeli invasion in 1982. The PKK began its own bloody guerilla war
in the Turkish part of Kurdistan in 1984 and began establishing mass
support among the Kurdish population. This mass support allowed the
PKK to initiate its own “Kurdish intifada” in the early 1990s,
culminating in a series of mass uprisings.

Internationally, however, the
PKK was often the subject of criticism from the left due to its
authoritarian leadership style, including claims that it killed internal
opponents, and strong nationalist sentiments. Öcalan himself was
kidnapped by Turkish secret services (most likely with the assistance of
the Mossad) on February 15, 1999, and has been imprisoned on the island
of Imrali ever since. In response to his arrest, tens of thousands of
Kurds launched protests all over the world. In Switzerland the army had
to be called up to protect UN buildings from Kurdish demonstrators. In
Germany, Kurdish demonstrators organised a series of marches and
occupations of public buildings. An attempt to occupy the Israel
embassy ended in the fatal shooting of four Kurdish protesters, for
which no Mossad agents were ever prosecuted.

The PKK ban in Germany

By the time of Öcalan’s arrest the PKK had already been banned in
Germany for six years. In the early 1990s the PKK with its 15,000
members constituted one of the strongest left-wing groups in Germany and
organised numerous demonstrations and political actions against the
brutal oppression faced by Kurds in Turkey and the continuing sales of
German weaponry to its NATO partner.

PKK supporters engaged in militant
actions like highway blockades, self-immolations, attacks on Turkish
travel agencies and the offices of Turkish fascist groups based in
Germany. The German state banned the PKK in 1993 with the intention of
assisting Turkey against one of its strongest opponents; equally
significant, however, was the wave of racist and anti-immigrant hysteria
gripping Germany at the time. The campaign to ban the PKK, the
so-called “Terror-Kurds”, was much more significant than the legal
action taken against other left-wing groups by the German state, for it
amounted to a de facto ban on political activity for one of Germany’s
largest immigrant communities.

The US and EU soon followed, placing the
PKK on their respective “terror lists”. To this day, simply displaying a
PKK symbol at a political demonstration is enough to provoke German
police to attack and disperse it. There have been 4500 legal
proceedings related to PKK activities since 2004 alone. Since 1996, more than
100 PKK functionaries have been penalised, some sentenced to prison. As
late as October of this year, the German Foreign Ministry described the
PKK as being equally as dangerous as the Islamic State. In the same
report, the ministry emphasised the continued mobilisational capacity of
the PKK: according to the Foreign Ministry, the PKK has 14,000 members
and a mobilisable periphery of roughly 50,000 additional Kurds and
sympathisers. This strength was reflected in the demonstrations in the
first half of October, which saw thousands of Kurds take to the streets,
demanding solidarity with Kobanê, an end to the PKK ban and Öcalan’s
release.

The changing nature of the PKK

Öcalan’s arrest was followed by a phase of critical self-reflection
and new perspectives within the Kurdish movement. The PKK, animated by
the realisation that a state alone is no guarantee of democracy and
freedom, abandoned demands for an independent state, advocating a form
of “democratic confederalism” in its place. This confederalism would, in
practice, mean an association of local democratic structures of
self-organisation and self-governance within the existing states.

Feminist and ecological demands began to receive more attention within
the party. Öcalan’s recent political writing exhibit clear influences
from both the Zapatistas as well as the North American anarchist Murray
Bookchin. Within Turkey itself, the PKK contributed to building a broad
alliance with various Turkish left parties, as well as the women’s and
LGBTI movements. The alliance’s presidential candidate, Selahattin
Demirtas, received nearly 10% of the vote in the August 2014 election,
uniting the Kurdish left, the “old” Turkish left and the new generation
of activists from the Gezi Park movement.

Led by the PKK and its sister organisations, Kurdistan has witnessed
the emergence of numerous grassroots movements for democracy, education,
gender equality and social justice.

These form the left-wing
alternative within the Kurdish movement to the corrupt and
pro-imperialist KDP and PUK. These two parties seek an independent state
in northern Iraq and enjoy Western backing; in return, the West expects
unrestricted access to oil fields in the area as well as political
marginalisation of the PKK and its allies.

There is strong evidence
indicating that the leadership of the northern Iraqi Kurds intentionally
withdrew its troops and abandoned the Yazidis to the IS in order to
force the West’s hand to intervene and provide weaponry to the Kurdish
resistance. Whether the abandonment was intentional or not, the desired
effect was achieved, as the Peshmerga have now begun to receive weapons
from the West.

What the conservative Kurdish groups did not expect,
however, was the PKK’s determined intervention on behalf of the Yazidis
and the widespread support and sympathy this generated within the
Kurdish population. Thousands of Yazidis joined the PKK and YPG and are
now setting up their own self-defence units. These units desperately
need modern weaponry but will not be receiving it from the West, for
whom the PKK and YPG remain little more than “terrorists”.

In response to this unanswered need, a host of German radical left
groups (Neue Antikapitalistische Organisation [NAO], Antifaschistische
Revolutionäre Aktion Berlin [ARAB] and Perspektive Kurdistan) have
launched the “Weapons for the YPG” campaign. They managed to collect
over €40,000 in a matter of weeks. A similar initiative started by the
Danish left-wing party Eenhedslisten (Red_Green Alliance] sent more than €7,000 to the PYD.

With civil disobedience against the PKK ban

The desperate need for weapons notwithstanding, it would be wrong for
the radical left to support the West’s arming of the Iraqi Kurdish
organisations KPD and PUK. Western assistance to these Kurds is intended
to stabilise and consolidate the influence of imperialist powers in the
region – precisely the imperialist powers that enabled the rise of the
IS in the first place. It is highly possible that the same weapons
currently being used against the IS will soon be turned against the PKK.

Rather than get caught up in a debate about the merits of Western
support, the Western and the German left in particular should start a
powerful campaign against the ban on the PKK. A repeal of the ban would
constitute direct assistance to the most important leftist formation in
the Middle East and thus be a blow against imperialist interests. Given the
nearly 800,000 Kurds currently living in Germany, there is no question
that the left could mobilise around the issue successfully.

Moreover, a repeal of the PKK ban is politically feasible: even
conservative media outlets are beginning to acknowledge the
contradiction between the West’s fight against IS on the one hand, and
its suppression of the PKK on the other. The radical left should
organise demonstrations against the ban and openly display the banned
flags and symbols of the PKK. These would be concrete, visible signs of
anti-imperialist solidarity with the progressive and democratic
movements in the Middle East.

[Florian Wilde is a German historian as
well as Senior Research Fellow for Trade Union Politics at the
Institute for Social Analysis of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. He was a
member of the National Executive Committee of Die Linke (the Left
Party) from 2012 to 2014.]

Glossary

IS (Islamic State): reactionary Salafist
organisation pursuing the establishment of a theocratic Islamic state in
Syria and Iraq via military means. The group was known as ISIS until
June 2014.

Patriotic Union of Kurdistan: Social-democratic Kurdish political party in Iraq, led by the Talabani clan.

PYD (Democratic Union Party): Kurdish political
party in Syria, sister party of the PKK. In the course of the Syrian
civil war, the PYD established a self-organised democratic system of
governance in a semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan (“Rojava”).

YPG (People’s Protection Units): Kurdish militia in Syria with political ties to the PKK and PYD.

[This article is an updated, extended and revised version of a text that first appeared in German in the magazine Marx21, September 2014.]